After the cloning of the fragile histidine triad (FHIT) gene at 3p14.2 (Ohta et al, 1996), subsequent genetics studies demonstrated frequent allelic deletion and aberrant FHIT transcripts were observed in primary lung cancers (Sozzi et al, 1996; Fong et al, 1997) and cell lines of small-cell and non-small-cell types (Yanagisawa et al, 1996). Here, FHIT is linked to lung cancer.